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THE NEW INDIVIDUAL AND THE WORK OF CIVILIZATION
1. Minority and Majority Man
Times come when everything seems to be caught in the relentless grip of Change. The Old falls to pieces and everywhere we witness the proclamation of "new" things, new ideals, new forms, new names. None will deny that we are passing through such a period. But what one too often fails to ask is whether all this abundant cropping up of new "things" and new isms is a sufficient foundation for a really new Order. Can all these new things and forms be really new if Man himself, who is the one to give meaning to these forms, is still made up of the same old substance and the same reactions?
Man is the measure of all things. He gives meaning to all things. But he often fails to use his own spiritual birthright as the Namer of all experiences which the earth proffers to him. The earth changes. It has its own cycle of transformation. It passes through new regions of the cosmos, through new fields of sidereal electro-magnetism. New inductive energies are thus aroused in the planet, which affect collective mankind. Then strange urges seize masses of men; new powers are released almost without the will of individuals who stumble upon them. The rhythm of mankind as a whole is altered. A new type of man arises.
Man is the measure of all revolutions. They fail or succeed in proportion as enough individuals are able or not to live up to the revolutionary type imposed upon a few by the need for a certain type of activity. Every transformation of the collective substance of humanity requires a certain type of human constitution. But while the required type of human constitution is more or less an outcome of general material surroundings and of the changing conditions of life, yet this type will always try to sink to the lowest possible level of consciousness, by the very law of material and spiritual inertia, and to retrogress toward the old type, unless out of the revolution, or crisis of change, a new aristocracy evolves, a new elite representing the positive and unadulterable Image of the new human type.
Aristocracy means the rule of the best. And as a matter of fact it is always the best that rule or lead the destinies of mankind. BUT, we must not give to the term "best" a fixed and ethical meaning. The best is always that which represents best the tendencies of the day. If it be a day of virtue, the "best" is the most virtuous; but if it be a day of criminality and viciousness, the "best" is the most daring criminal. Whatever the figureheads of a government might be, the actual rulers are always those who incarnate to the fullest extent the qualities necessary to cope with actuality; they are always men of destiny, i.e., men who are made of the stuff of destiny, of actuality; of particular space-time conditions, we might say. They rule men who incarnate to the full the subconscious, cosmic ideal of the time and region which they rule. They are the efflorescence because of being so absolutely typical, because through them destiny speaks.
The man of destiny or the group of destiny comes to power in virtue of a cosmic need. Such a man becomes the focal point for the destiny of an epoch, of a collectivity. Through him destiny operates, because he embodies the significance of that particular point of time and space, because he is an absolutely significant being. He is the Archetype manifest, the incarnate Hero - whether he be a Confucius in China or a Mussolini in Italy or a Gandhi in India. Thus by virtue of being the Individual-type he projects his own characteristics upon those who are ready to be fecundated by the cosmic need of the hour, those who are ready for regeneration - this term being used in a purely non-moral way with no idea of progress or regress attached to it.
These men who have thus become embodiments of a set of human characteristics which were needed at that special point of time and space, constitute a group of destiny, and thus of aristocracy. They are always a minority. Only minorities rule. Only minorities perform effective acts. Only minorities are really human, in the sense of efficient humanhood, of embodied spirit . . . at least at the present stage of human development.
The point, however, is that there is no value in the fact that they are minorities. There is no value, no real vital value, in quantity. Only, because of the present stage of human growth, it is impossible for majorities to be significant in a spiritual sense. They are significant only when they are led by some powerful and meaningful minority which is a group of destiny. "Led" does not mean autocratically ruled. It may mean guided, inspired or what not. The fact is that no majority is conscious of destiny; no majority produces significant types in the spiritual sense. It is but the inchoate condition of manhood. It is an earth-product; that out of which significant Man is born, the base metal out of which the gold of Human Nobility is extracted alchemically.
The Noble Man is the man in whom destiny incarnates, through whom the self of the race (another name for destiny) speaks and acts out its own necessary characteristics. He is a man conscious of responsibility and ready to go to the very end in order that such responsibility, deliberately assumed, be fulfilled. The Noble Man is necessarily the minority-man, and will be so for long ages to come - and possibly from a universal standpoint is always a minority-man in the whole wide universe. Exactly as the seed is always a minority-group of plant cells. unless perhaps artificial conditions be induced by man. In the seed is embodied the ultimate and permanent characteristic formula which defines the species. The seed is the "avatar" or Incarnation of the Soul of the Species, the Archetype made manifest, at least as a potentiality, as a matrix of significant deeds. The seed is a group of destiny, the aristocracy of the plant.
Now every age of human development has its seed-group of Noble Men (again without any moral meaning attached to the term), and it has its leaf-cells which constitute the masses, the majority. As a new set of cosmic influences begins to manifest upon the earth, as new geographical, climatic, economical, etc. . . . conditions begin to prevail, a fundamental change begins to take place within the plant of humanity. Let us suppose that summer has come and fall is impending. The leaves perhaps begin to crystallize or soon to turn yellow and decay. The seed-group of cells matures within the fruit and is ready for release when the fruit begins to decay.
Thus a dual rhythm may be witnessed; the rhythm of what we will call the leaf-man, the man of the mass, heading toward degeneration, and the rhythm of the seed-man achieving maturity and being released as the fulfillment of the plant, as the Incarnation of the Species' will for self-reproduction and permanency.
This analogy, like all analogies, must not be pushed too far; but it may give a useful symbolical representation of the condition of humanity today. The masses of humanity are decaying rapidly and MUST more or less do so, unless the human tree should be considered as a perennial growth, which does not seem to be the case at present considering the way in which all civilizations of the past have been destroyed almost to the point of leaving no vestiges of their once mighty structures. But while this degeneration takes place, an opposite process of regeneration or perhaps "in-generation" is occurring; the formation of a new elite, of new groups of destiny, of a new Nobility.
Keyserling, whose penetrating studies of world-conditions and philosophy of significance are of very great import at the present time in spite of certain typically European ideas and feelings which may not be of the most useful kind, has given to the majority type of human beings living and increasing at this time the name: "chauffeur-type." It is probably a very good appellation. To the minority-type, for the breeding of which he is working, he would probably give the name of "philosopher type." We would rather call it the "Civilizer type;" and we shall justify this term and explain it in the following pages.
At any rate let us repeat at the outset of this essay that there are two types of human beings in the world today; in fact that in a sense there are always two types of human beings: the man of Nobility who incarnates and enacts Destiny, i.e., the particular significance of the point of time and space where he functions as a representative of the Race - "representative" because of his proven ability to assume and discharge the responsibilities of the moment; and then the man of the mass who grows toward full humanhood in proportion as he fulfills first his own individual destiny or congenital duties, then the destiny of the group towards which he has been attracted.
The man of destiny acts from a super-personal center of being. He is in the highest sense of the term an Actor. He assumes a part in the great Race- drama and fulfills it. His own personality is used only as a generator of power. The great Actor dynamizes his public because as a personality he has generated power, magnetism, etc. But such a display of power is not, in the highest cases, for the sake of personal enjoyment, but so that the message of the character he embodies be forcefully delivered. Being a forceful personality he acts forcefully, but acts in the name of the greater Self which is the Destiny of that particular Moment of Life.
On the contrary the mass-man acts from his own personal center. He does not assume responsibility but usually claims privilege-two diametrically opposed attitudes.
II. Culture-Man and Civilization Man
This general dualism of human types being understood, we must now study the meaning of the set of characteristics which are being incarnated in the race at this time, both in the higher and the lower types of human beings. In order to do so as clearly as possible we will have to come back to the definite distinction which we made in a previous essay between culture and civilization ("Dissonant Harmony" p. 14 and following) and especially characterize what we will call the culture-man and the civilization-man, the respective products of these two aspects of human living.
A culture being essentially "a natural, spontaneous phenomenon . . . the flowering of life-experiences, of physical-emotion experiences. . . the prolongation of the race's physiological development" it follows that the typical culture-man is first and foremost an actional, instinctual and muscular being. His life is centered in his organs of action: hands, feet, sex. It is ruled by a kind of instinctual intelligence which is born out of a natural adaptation to the conditions of physical physiological life. The two primordial instincts: that of self-preservation (food) and self-reproduction (sex) dominate his life. Thus the culture-man is seen especially as peasant or hunter, as warrior or nomad, as inhabitant of small villages living directly from the soil to which all human lives are closely bound.
Such a culture-life favors the development of character, of what Spengler and others called the race ethos, which ethos is strictly determined by natural conditions and immediate geographical surroundings. For such a man "work" is merely the activity of living. It has a meaning immediately perceptible. It has direct results in terms of vital achievements.
Cultural activities so-called are but the extension of daily useful activities. Culture-man is first the artificer-fashioner of instruments of utility: household instruments, weapons, etc. Whatever there is of Art is still bound to the concept of utility; later a less physical, yet just as practical and actional, sense of utility develops. Art becomes magical (cf. "Art as release of power"). Swords are chiseled in the shape of elemental gods to kill better, not to be: esthetically beautiful.
Religion, as we know it today, is non-existant. Every act of living becomes sacred on all planes, physical as well as spiritual; or rather there is no differentiation between spiritual and physical. Life is one. Every action is part of Life, and thus sacred. Life is a vast ritual. Priesthood organizes this ritualistic sense and gives it forms. All social activities thus become ceremonies consecrated by the priests - originally every father is priest to his family.
Religion was a mode of living; as we can still see so clearly in India. Castes arose as a system of organization of work, aiming for greater efficiency. But every type of work, to whatever caste it might belong, was held sacred. All experiences were sacred. The significance in all could be read or at least intuitively felt. The lowest servant was respected as a human being, as a manifestation of the Man-Principle within, of the Universal Self. So that a strict hierarchy of works was complemented with a deep sense of spiritual equality; or rather perhaps not equality, but identity. All men were identical in the Universal Self; only their incarnations, the actional aspect of their innermost Self, were differentiated, tabulated and kept separated . . so that every mode of activity might be kept pure and unadulterated, fulfilled in one-pointed devotion and unwavering concentration.
Civilization begins as a kind of Divine Unrest manifesting within the natural earth-bound sphere of fulfillment of Race activities when a few restless minds search for universal values unconnected with geographical, racial, physical conditions. Culture is based on the panorama of changing seasons and conditions of living. It is based on the idea of reincarnation through various castes, through various realms of activity. Culture signifies change, growth, maturity, decay. Civilization aspires to the Changeless, to the universalistic, to the absolutely True, to the Law. And thus denies the earth and all that is connected in man with emotional changes and moods.
It manifests, as we have seen before, in two basic quests; the Quest for Gold and the Quest for God.
The Quest for Gold is the basis of commercialism and of the growth of the bourgeoisie so strikingly described by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto. In Europe it began with the great adventures toward India, the land of fabulous gold and of spices, in the XIVth and XVth centuries, with the opening of the great trade routes binding continents and races and thus universalizing at least the body of mankind, breaking down racial particularism.
Commerce is essentially non-productive and non-muscular; it requires instead mental calculation and daring. The focus is progressively shifted from physical mastery to mental efficiency and organizing power. The struggle is but partly one against natural conditions. It becomes primarily in a sense a struggle against other men, intellectual competition. It becomes increasingly so as machines multiply. Machine-power supersedes muscular power. Money-power supersedes blood values, the nobility of wealth that of blood. Cunning takes the place of character.
Work takes on another meaning; and in most cases becomes meaningless. It ceases to be the fulfillment of natural activity for the sake of immediate tangible results, for results always connectable to Life. It becomes toil for wages. It symbolizes fateful and hated oppression in the case of the laborer become proletarian. It means mostly a means to satisfy ambition or greed in the case of the man-in-the-office, the boss, the capitalist.
Because of the fact that work has lost all significance in terms of life and life-fulfillment, because it has become slavery (whether in the ancient or the modern form) a continual struggle between proletarians and bourgeois merchants ensues. The struggle becomes more violent as workers are taught to use machines; for thereby they become educated. Education leads to rebellion. The Quest for Gold leads to wholesale murder whether it be the murder of the Incas, or the murder attending modern revolutions.
The Quest for God brings us to the other pole of civilization, to the other type of civilization-manhood. In its true meaning such a Quest is the search for universal Laws and for that changeless, eternal Knowledge which makes Man a master of natural conditions. These natural conditions may be of many kinds; they may be physical or psychic or metaphysical, but in all cases they represent Nature, cosmic or human. Man as master of Nature - this is the ideal of civilization-man. This ideal he symbolizes as God. To reach it, Mind must be developed; whether it be scientific or abstract or occult Mind.
Understanding becomes the main goal, rather than character. Culture-man was essentially projective; civilization-man, comparative. Impersonal science takes the place of self-expression through creative activity.
However, because this Quest for God or for Truth requires not only mind concentration, but also will-power (a sort of meta-muscular activity) it does not cause of itself a lessening of activity. It only transfers the focus of the actional effort. But very soon, in the present stage of humanity, this actional mental effort degenerates into mere longing to reach God. The will to know the Universal Law and thus to master matter, degenerates into the personal emotional pseudo-mystical aspiration to be one with God. Prayer takes the place of study and mental activity. Passivity follows activity. Civilization begins to degenerate.
Then we have sensorial passivity to impressions. Hedonism and the esthetical attitude, the need for constant enjoyment and nerve-titillations are the result. Emotional passivity leads to the religious belief in a Revelation from a personal God. The belief in atonement, in vicarious living; it leads to a condition of spiritual slavery to the priest. Men become divided into two classes. On the one hand the priests dispensing salvation; on the other, men considered as sinners, as spiritual beggars having to pray and do penance in order to be fed by the church. The Church appears as a sort of spiritual banking house dispensing as it wills the interests on the capital of Divine Grace accumulated by the sacrifice of Christ. Intellectual passivity manifests as the constant greedy reading of newspapers, books dispensing also the opinions and the mental wealth of knowledge accumulated by Science and its High-priests. Muscular passivity takes the shape of the craving for physical comfort. The lack of exertion leads to sluggish circulation and neuroses and sex-perversions of all sorts.
In other words as the products of such a passive attitude in the civilization-type of manhood we have: The monk and nun praying in seclusion, the esthetician worshipping art for art's sake and formal beauty; and in general the city-man, a standardized, characterless being acquiescent or revolting according to his temperament or the condition of his liver, mindless though always busy with brains which he uses just as a radio constantly turned on. Amid the clatter and din of these brains the Voice of Self can never be heard. Especially as intellect mixes with the senses and brings forth a constant craving for pleasures. Artificial excitants are needed to give a sort of dream- meaning to a life which has lost its spiritual significance, its actional significance; because the Actor in man is dead. There remains only the puppet, slave to the mechanical powers he has summoned and which feed on his soul.
This is what the German philosophers with Spengler call civilization. But in truth it is only the shadow, the alcoholic decay oozing out from the once glorious Living Civilization, the manifestation of the Universal Self in Man.
III. Living Civilization
Living civilization is a process. It is not so much a thing as a certain type of human mental-spiritual activity which links two different realms of Life, physical and metaphysical. Civilization has its symbol in the City; but not necessarily the kind of world-wide brothel or market-place which is called today a metropolis. The City is the Gate of the spiritual world. One must pass through the City. Even beyond that physical and degenerate city of cubic stones and bleeding sacrificial altars there can be perceived, if one has the vision, the Holy City of the Mystics of all ages, the Hierousalem of the Jews, the Shamballah of the Oriental esotericists.
Such a City is the home of the Great Civilizers of all eras, the shrine wherein lives and whence periodically radiates that Universal Knowledge which is the goal of all civilization-men, whether they know it or not. How can this City, this Knowledge be reached? By living the true life of a civilizer. There is no other way.
Such a life is symbolized most perfectly in the life of Gautama the Buddha, the prototype of all civilizers for our present humanity. (Before his time human conditions were somewhat of a different nature, a difference which cannot be studied here). The Buddha's life shows us in the beginning a being endowed with all the perfections which the acme of cultural life could offer. A prince of miraculous beauty, with wealth, love and happiness showered upon him. All these things of the world of Form and Beauty, he renounces; because he has seen death and suffering and his boundless compassion forces him onward on the Quest of this Universal Law and Knowledge which will give him mastery over death and suffering. Mastery for his own sake? No, but that all men be freed from misery and reach that eternal Bliss of which his own earthly happiness was but a fleeting reflection.
And so about his twenty-eighth year Gautama flings back all his earthly possessions, wife and son included, and wanders on the Quest for Truth. Seven years of quest, of study, of asceticism and meditation. By the combined power of will and mind-which constitute metaphysical "character," the beyond of physical character - Guatama conquers Truth. He becomes a Free Man; free from change, from earthly limitations, a master over time and space, these tyrants which can only be conquered within the consciousness, and not, as modern man believes still, by the help of machines.
Then Mara, the spirit of Evil, tempts him. "What are men to thee," says the Tempter. "Enjoy thou thy release and thy bliss. No one matters." But because Gautama had set out on his journey prompted by the great urge of Compassion and had built such a compassionate love during many incarnations, he does not heed the Tempter. He comes back to men as a Civilizer. He brings them his Vision - an experience of the metaphysical realms-that they, too, may become free, released from the power of the Wheel of Change.
Such a life divides itself into two parts which correspond generally speaking to the two halves of a normal life of seventy years. The process is two-fold. First, the Quest for Knowledge-first-hand knowledge gained by will-power and renunciation, as well as by study and comparison. Then, the compassionate bringing back of the Truth discovered... if one is a Buddha, an Adept of the White Path.
The first process must be understood as the process of piercing through Nature. While culture-man adapts himself to Nature and as it were rides on the crest of its ever changing tides, civilization-man pierces through. Thus he is, in a more definite sense, a Conqueror. Civilization is built on conquest, on the mastery over Nature, outer and inner Nature, and first of all one's own nature.
But there are two types of conquerors and conquests. The spiritual conqueror is symbolized by the Buddha, who fulfills the past while renouncing its glamour, who burns the illusions of the senses by the fire of spiritual concentration and thus comes face to face with the Eternal Virgin of Wisdom, his own subliminal Self. Then the political conqueror symbolized by Alexander the Great who cuts the Gordian Knot (the enigma of Life) with a sword, who burns the past (burning Persepolis and destruction of all Magian knowledge), marries by force the princess whose realm he destroyed and ends his life in sexual excesses.
The Fire of Buddha is the alchemical fire which transmutes and regenerates. The sword of Alexander is the symbol of war and autocracy. Out of Alexander's life-work came Alexandria, the city in which the spiritual seed of Christian Europe was destroyed and Christianity made a dogma which killed and burned millions of martyrs where Hypatia the great virgin philosopher was murdered. From Alexander through Caesar come all the modern types of autocratic tyrants. From Buddha flows the ever-living stream of great Spiritual Teachers and Masters of Compassion.
Compassionate Knowledge and Autocratic Power these are the two ultimate poles of civilization. The civilizer has to choose between both. The choice is fully his. That choice is really made every moment of the quest for knowledge and mastery but it culminates in the great Moment when Mara, the Evil One, faces the Conqueror of Truth. The ultimate decision makes of one a power of universal life, or a power of destruction.
When the Conqueror comes back from his Vision as the Victorious, his next task is to act as a Fecundator. He must stamp his Vision upon the Age. He becomes then an Incarnation of the Truth or Idea or Power he has mastered, of That which he IS. In mystical parlance he becomes his own son conceived through and in the Idea he mastered.
Walt Whitman wonderfully expressed the nature of such a being in his poem: "To Him that was crucified:"
"We, compassionaters, perceivers, rapports of men. We walk unheld, free, the whole earth over, journeying up and down, till we make our ineffaceable mark upon time and the diverse eras, that the men and women of races, ages to come, may prove brethren and lovers as we are."
Such a mission as the civilizer's obviously requires certain human characteristics of a definite nature. If the man must first of all be a Conqueror, the basic quality required must needs be that of courage and utter devotion to the Quest. These qualities pertain undoubtedly to what we can call "character." But here we encounter a kind of "character" which is somewhat different from that required of the tribesman or hunter. The courage demanded is not so much physical as mental. It is indissolubly bound to clarity of perception, to intellectual honesty, as also to the faculty of spiritual discrimination which is born of the true knowledge. It is courage; the field of expression of which is no longer physical but metaphysical. Likewise the devotion to the Quest makes for one-pointedness of mental search. It energizes the discriminative faculty; it casts out all doubts and tangential wanderings.
When the Vision is reached, the experience in the metaphysical world of Ideas when man has united with the Idea which he is to stamp upon the wax of human personalities and has become thus an Image-carrier, then other qualities are required of him. The essential quality is that of unalterability.
The man has become an Image-carrier; he must project this Image of Destiny, in which is locked the Significance of the Age. What if after impressing that Image upon a few men the outlines of the image would become blurred and lose their clearcutness? But the Image is the man himself; it is not a separate thing he carries. He has become that Image. He is no longer a person; he is an Idea; an Institution - especially when death will have cut from his destiny all the personal emotionality. His life, his being must be that Image; they must be sharp ill outline; so that the Image may be cut in all its clearness into the recipient.
This unalterability rests in an absolute faith in destiny, absolute faith in the civilizer's "star," absolute faith in the Vision beheld. If the man doubts his own metaphysical experience, if he doubts his own power, which he must assume to be the power of destiny, then all the opposing forces which will crowd around him will succeed in making of him a blurred Image. He will compromise. His words and deeds will no longer well up from the depth of destiny, they will no longer be the purely unadulterated words and deeds of the Age. A Great Betrayal will have been committed. The man will have become the tool of the opposite aspect of civilization. He will have become an inadequate builder or an inadequate destroyer, whatever the case may be; a failure. Nature spits out the luke-warm, it is said. There is no greater evil for a civilizer than luke-warmness; for his work must be founded upon the rock of uncompromising strength, of undauntable energy, and perseverance. The Image must be stamped over and over again; no weariness is permitted, no soft-heartedness either if the Image sears perhaps the living flesh. Compassion has a heart of rock, because it is rooted in permanency, in the Changeless and the True.
Compassion must be blended with strength on the path of the Builders. Compassion which means that the deeds of the compassionater are doors to the Wholeness of Life, that they absorb all the disturbances which the impress may have caused in the recipient, for they are of the nature of boundless and eternal Harmony.
What this means can be further elucidated if we sum up the three moments of activity in any civilizing deed. First, the old roots of past perversions and errors must be courageously torn up and burned; the "clean soil" to which Plato refers must be produced. No true work can be done save on a clean soil. The first stage is the one of purification, the purification of the substance of the new creation.
The second stage is that of stamping the Archetypal Image by words and deeds upon the clean soil of humanity. This clean soil means nothing more or less than a small apostolic brotherhood which the civilizer will have gathered around him. It is the soil which is to receive the seed, and in a more intimate sense it is the cotyledons of the seed on which the germ eventually will feed in its first stages of growth. It is the group of destiny which will be the first recipient of the Image and will grow into the likeness of this Image and thus radiate it abroad.
Such a stamping of the Image by the civilizer and later by small groups of civilizers is to be constantly repeated. Every relationship which the civilizer enters into finds at its core such an act of stamping, such an act of spiritual fecundation. The civilizer has ceased to be (ideally speaking) a personality. He has become a photographic plate through which Light pours impressing positive images on all sensitized soul-substance. His life is an almost endless repetition of words and deeds, all carriers of the Image. He indeed needs great perseverance, patience. He needs to overcome that most subtle danger, weariness of giving, the yearning to be mothered, to become untensioned, formless. . . the yearning for Nirvana.
But there is also a third phase, if one is to be a Buddha of Compassion, if one is to perform the deeds of Wholeness and incarnate absolute Harmony, consciously and deliberately. The Civilizer must absorb the consequences of his fecundative actions. He must father his children and pay for all the failures. He must offer himself, a sacrificial victim to his enemy, to those who have to oppose and kill him perhaps, because they could not understand; and rushing to him in blind attraction had to love him with their hatred.
In certain books it is said that Buddha had to reincarnate again and again so as to bear the karma of those who failed to grasp his doctrine and having misused it injured themselves. It is said that the moment a Spiritual Teacher takes a pupil, he becomes responsible for all the failures and misdeeds of that pupil until he reaches the point of adeptship. The Sun heals and kills. The Sun must bring life again to those it has killed. Siva is said to be blue with the poison which began to fill the world when the gods extracted therefrom the Elixir of Life immortal. Truth, like the Sun, may kill as well as regenerate, and by virtue of the Law of Universal Harmony the bearer of the Truth that killed must take the burden of him that was killed and regenerate him. The coming of a Christ makes the good better and the evil more sinister in whatever it touches. Again and again He must come to the earth to expiate the sins of his deluded followers and as well of his persecutors.
IV. The New Aristocracy of Civilizers
This revolutionary age we are living in does not mark only the transition between two small cultural cycles, between the Piscean and the Aquarian Ages so-called. It represents a much greater beginning, the opening of gates that will be the threshold of an era which may encompass hundreds of thousands of years; possibly still vaster periods. A definite change of vibrations is taking place in the earth itself; it knows itself pregnant with a new humanity. This age of darkness and materialism which the Hindus call Kali Yuga is also the period of gestation of a new MAN. If the Mother is upset and in pain, if the human Race wails for the serenity and innocence lost it is because a new life is growing within, just beginning to grow, a small embryo as yet.
Earth-born humanity as a whole is but the matrix of spiritual MAN. Emotional, personal manhood is the womb in which the new race of Civilizers is being formed. It is formed by periodical, though in a sense also continual adjunctions. The Embryo within is growing by attracting to itself cell after cell from the Mother's blood. One after one these individual cells or atoms leave the magnetic tract of the Mother's circulatory system and join the new field of force in which the Embryo develops.
This is more than a symbol; the analogy is most accurate. Teachers of old sounded the call: Be ye separate! Enter the New Life! Even the call which John the Baptist uttered through Palestine two thousand years ago had the same significance. We translate it badly as: Repent ye! It meant in fact: Be born beyond your self. Arise to the New Life.
Every atom passing from the Mother's orb to the Child body must "be separate." He must arise from the old route of earthly embodiments and start on a new rhythm which makes of him a man in the flesh still but not of this flesh which is the flesh of the mass-man. He must leave the old realm and become a citizen of the New Humanity, a man of the City - the Holy City referred to already - a Civilizer.
Earth-born culture-man may be regenerated into civilizationman; though he may just as well - and in fact most of the time - degenerate into the citified entity, the tragic puppet type which fills our great metropoles. As culture-man pursues the Quest for God or Truth and succeeds in keeping himself positive, in evading the religious-devotional-mediumistic abyss in which most travelers become engulfed, he begins to function in terms of Living Civilization, and not of its perverted shadow, so-called modern civilization.
The exodus from country to cities is but a symbol of the sacred Quest which leads Man from earthly limitations and earth-born consciousness to the Holy City, the great Brotherhood of Civilizers who collectively constitute the new Man. This new MAN is really what is usually named the Great White Lodge by people who have more or less paganized and materialized the concepts of spiritual Science. The so-called Masters and Adepts are the Centers of magnetism and consciousness in this new MAN, this growing Child of our present Humanity. They attract to themselves individuals who are ready to assume the burden of Living Civilization, ready to pierce through Nature and behold the Vision of this new MAN of whom they may have become a conscious part, if they will, if they dare.
There is no sentimentality involved in the process, no vague devotionalism and mere wishing. It is a hard, common-sense, obstinately-fought-for realization of That which we all, each of us, bear within our own mental-spiritual womb: What has been called the Christ-child. The individual being who has chosen the Path that leads to the embryo of the new MAN within the womb of present day mankind, he who has entered the embryonic gates, who has been "initiated" (i.e. has entered), such a one indeed "lives in Christ" as said St. Paul. He lives in Christ, the new MAN, just as atoms that once belonged to the Mother live in her child within the womb.
There is nothing "mystical" or in a sense "occult" about the process. At any rate there is nothing which cannot be understood by the philosophical Mind once it becomes freed from emotionalism and from sentimental traditions and prejudices. If we cannot see beyond the chaotic cosmopolitanism of modern city-life the pull of forces leading Man from earth-bound conditions of cultural growth to universalistic realizations, to the transcendant glory of Living Civilization, it is because we are still slaves to forms, slaves to institutions, slaves to our blood-fumes out of which have risen for aeons the phantasms of religion, family-worship, sectarianism and nationalism.
We must leave behind these creations of our blood-self, these physiological gods that have fed for ages upon the very substance of our being and have cloaked themselves with grandiloquent names and illusory greatness. We must reach beyond the realm of decaying leaves and ascend to the realm of seed wherein the permanent reality of Life, archetypal MAN, focuses itself whole. From creatures of Change we must become incarnations of the Changeless. We must leave behind the cultural realm in which forms grow, mature and necessarily decay, and pass through the gates of the White City into the realm of Living Civilization which is not only the new MAN, the next stage of collective human life, but even more Archetypal Manhood, Changeless Manhood.
We can connect the term City (civitas) with the name Siva. Siva is both destroyer and regenerator. He is the patron of all Civilizers. He is the symbol of all transformations and metamorphoses; the symbol of that perpetual onward cyclic motion which is the very essence of Spirit. Living Civilization is a process, not a thing. It is the urge toward ceaseless growth; it is the fire that burns the heart of men who settle not, who refuse to die the death of forms, who go on and on unceasingly, rising from cycle to cycle through endless Work and Dedication, shunning the illusory rest of temporary nirvanas and carrying on indefatigably the Work of the World, the Work of Living Civilization. Heart cells never rest. The Heart is a muscle, the central muscle. In it Rhythm goes on perpetually. While peripheral muscles have to wait for the bidding or desire in order to stir from their lethargical condition, the Heart-muscles work and never stop working.
They are the Civilizers of the plane of physical substance. But man has not his abode on the physical plane of blood. Man the Civilizer is the heart of some greater Body. But the process of Living Civilization is the same everywhere. It is an actional process; it is the process of spiritual Action, that is Action without rest, because unbounded by form and untrammeled by the residua of activity-in-form. It is a heroic process.
We need today a new race of Heroes, a new Nobility of Spiritual Workers. We need those who will build the Heart of the new MAN, the red heroic center of the New Life. That is the goal for all strong individuals, for all fearless souls. We need a new race of Kshattryias, of Warriors. Men who have had the Vision because they have dared to fight for it, dared to pierce through Nature and wrenching from life the Jewel of Significance, dared to assume power and responsibility, and now will to fulfill such a responsibility to the Future.
We want philosophers, yes. But philosophers who are men of action on the plane of Mind. Not contemplaters, but doers. Not mystics, but adepts. Men for whom thinking means acting mentally, not, as it usually does, associating remembrances and pasting up together undigested materials gathered here and there. Such men will be the seed of the future Aristocracy which will lead the world, the Companions of the Brotherhood of Civilizers that will carry on, unceasingly, throughout the long ages of darkness and gestation the work of the Heart of MAN.
Let the individual be regenerated so that he may assume such a destiny! It is of little use today to speak to masses which by virtue of the relative failure of last century's spiritual impetus cannot as a whole respond to the New Life. He that speaks to the masses becomes a slave to the masses. Let us speak to the individuals. Let us bring together these few here and there who are ready to assume responsibility and work. Let us build a new Aristocracy of Work: individuals who work and create, whose lives are the constant beating of joyous harmonious living deeds; marriages whose soul and significance is work. Work jointly assumed and freely discharged; groups the purpose of which is to act as collective embodiments of some principle of work.
Work, work . . . noble work, sacrificial, sacramental work; right from the center of the Living Self, right from living man to living man; a perpetual flow of Life, a rhythmical tone of being manifested through heroic doing. Work which is free, which is unbound by prejudice, by form; not clinging to the past, but soaring toward the future, nay moulding that very future. Work from which power radiates; power assumed for the sake of the Whole, in utter dedication to the Whole, AS the Whole. Work through which the Soul can pour and sing and glow earthward. Work that will transfigure the Body, all bodies; that will make them whole, that will be the resurrection of body. Work of Destiny. . . performed "for and as the Universal Self" without attachment to the fruits thereof.
Such work is the basis and the test of true spiritual Nobility; the requirement for entering the rank of the Aristocracy of Spiritual Workers which is the Heart of the New MAN. It is the work of the. Living Civilization.
